A
group of Somali immigrants in Sweden struggled to learn to skate this
summer so they could play bandy, a fast-paced ice-hockey-like game.

Thursday, September 05, 2013

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Sports fans whose heartstrings were tugged by the Jamaican bobsled team
back in the 1980s may have a new underdog to pull for as a group of
Somali men living in Sweden look to master the fast-paced and ice-cold
game of bandy.

Sports fans whose heartstrings were tugged by the Jamaican bobsled
team back in the 1980s may have a new underdog to pull for as a group of
Somali men living in Sweden look to master the fast-paced and ice-cold
game of bandy.

It is a form of larger-scale ice hockey popular in the Nordic
countries and Russia that is played by 11-man teams on soccer-size ice
fields, usually outdoors. Unlike hockey, bandy isn’t a body-checking
contact sport, but skaters move at furiously high speeds and the hard
plastic ball used instead of a puck can whiz very fast past a player’s
face.

Team Somalia’s coach, Per Fosshaug, a fiery Swedish bandy legend,
once held the unofficial bandy record and was able to fire shots at more
than 100 miles an hour into the top corners of the bandy goal.

The objectives of the game are the same as in ice hockey; the main
differences are the larger surface, more players and a ball instead of a
puck.

About two dozen young Somali hopefuls don’t have a lot of time to
master the game. Living in central Sweden, the players are hoping to be
the first team from Africa to compete in the world championships.

“It’s an amazing thing to get a chance to represent your country,” said Najib Farhan, a 16-year-old Somali.

The 2014 World Bandy Championships are to start in late January in
the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk, which boasts record low
temperatures of 57.5 degrees below zero. Some bandy leagues abide by
temperature rules that allow games to be called on account of cold, but
in the World Championships, temperatures have to drop to at least 22
below before a postponement is even considered. It helps to dress in
layers, with some Gore-Tex to protect players racing about at 30 mph
from the wind.

Players on Team Somalia have no illusions about their chances. “We
will probably lose by a hundred goals,” said Mr. Farhan, after one of
the team’s first practices. “But we will do our best.”

Mr. Fosshaug’s attempt to quickly whip a team into shape is proving
that the task isn’t going to be easy. Most of his charges have never
skated and some haven’t been in Sweden for more than six months. At
their first training in June in Sweden’s picturesque Dalarna region,
aspiring players struggled just to stay upright on roller blades, which
were being used as training wheels to prepare them for ice skates.

As Mr. Fosshaug gave instructions to pupils about flexibility of
limbs and the importance of using the gluteus maximus for leverage, his
players were clinging to one another, trying not to fall.

In an impromptu 40-meter race, or about 44 yards, there were lots of
flailing arms as beginners tried to maintain their balance. Almost half
the field ended up on the ground, some having to crawl to make it past
the finish line. As the Somali trainees strained to learn, Swedish
children who shared the course were gliding around, completely at ease
on their roller blades and bemused by their fellow skaters.

The Somali bandy experiment originated when a business consultant
named Patrik Andersson was out drinking with friends one night and
talking about the challenge immigrants face in Sweden. Mr. Andersson’s
hometown of Borlänge has 40,000 people, and 3,000 of them are from
Somalia, most of them refugees who fled war and poverty in their home
country. Many of them interact very little with the Swedes. Unemployment
is high among the Somalis.

Bandy fan Magnus Ståhl is a proxy for the local bandy fanaticism. He
has the sports club badge of Edsbyns IF tattooed on his arm and says the
game means “everything” to his village, population 4,000, 75 miles
north of Borlänge.

The team has won nine Swedish titles and at the height of its success
had average attendance of 2,000 at home games. But it is very uncommon
to see immigrants play bandy, Mr. Ståhl said, and audiences are pretty
homogeneous, reminiscent of Swedish life in the 1950s, before a half
century of immigration diversified the nation of 9.6 million people.

Looking to shake up the sport’s exclusivity, Mr. Andersson’s group
took the idea to the Federation of International Bandy, which is eager
to bring the game to new nations. It needs broader participation if it
is to someday secure a slot for bandy in the Olympics. The federation’s
secretary-general Bo Nyman said the idea seemed “a bit too fantastic”
when it was first broached to him. But after several meetings, he became
convinced it could work. He went to Montenegro in mid-July and got an
official green light for the Somali effort at the Federation’s Executive
Committee annual meeting.

Bandy evangelists face a challenge, however, given the dominance of soccer here in Sweden.

“I’ve coached a youth team, and I’ve only had one player who was an
immigrant,” Mr. Ståhl said. And the player quit to play soccer. “He was
good, but that was the first and only time I’ve seen an immigrant play
bandy in Edsbyn.”

He has seen some of the sport’s international stragglers, though, and
wasn’t impressed. The Netherlands had a training camp in the area and
played a game in Edsbyn, but the Dutch players were ill-equipped for the
match.

“They didn’t even have a full team. One of my colleagues, who used to
play bandy, had to join them as a goalkeeper,” Mr. Ståhl said.

Bandy is merciless. A team with superior skating skills can run
roughshod over lesser opponents. The last time the U.S. national bandy
team played at the top level of the World Championship, they were beaten
15-0 by Sweden and 19-3 by Russia.

Still, the Somali pioneers in Borlänge are enthusiastic.

Mohammed Ahmed, 17, who was one of a small Somali delegation that
traveled to Stockholm earlier this year to watch the national final, was
impressed by the atmosphere at the game. One of five Somalis in a crowd
of nearly 40,000, the novice spectator found bandy to be a bit hard to
follow. It takes a trained eye to be able to follow the small pink ball
or anticipate the pace of play.

Hassan Osman, one of the leaders of the local Somali football club
who is now learning bandy, said about all he could make out was “a lot
of players moving in all different directions.”

Mr. Ahmed, studying at an introduction program for immigrants, said
that although the trip to Stockholm was a great experience, “it would
have been even cooler if it were a soccer game.”

Mr. Fosshaug, the coach, is approaching this project with a healthy
dose of patience. “I don’t have any expectations of them firing a shot
into the top corner,” he said. “But there are other top corners to aim
for, whether in the labor market, in family life or in the community.”